Somebody's Gotta Do It

I ran across this sentence buried in a post, entitled Somebody's Gotta Do It the other day:

Yet I can’t tell you how often I’ve sat down with an activist whose latest policy paper is all about solutions, and in heart-to-heart conversation they reveal that they don’t really think our species has much of a chance of avoiding major catastrophe, maybe even extinction.

Ok, so we are heading to disaster. I'm not going to worry about extinction. If it happens, c'est la vie, or c'est la morte, but there isn't anything to concern myself with after that. :-)

In the meantime, this is my big three list of things to look for:

1. A way (or some ways) to organize society that is humane, sustainable and attainable. I know there are people who offer solutions, but I have yet to hear one that I believe would be both good & could actually happen. The ones that sound good usually seem to require a population made of saints, which I think has no more chance of happening than an ice sculpture of Notre Dame being around the morning after a big party in Hades.
2. Population control and/or reduction
3. Sustainable and abundant energy

The last of these strikes me as the most tractable, but I don't see any major progress happening.

In the meantime, I think I'll watch out for the disaster.

The growth of poverty

I have heard people say things to the effect that we, the relatively rich of the world, can't continue hogging the worlds resources.

I think this is a misunderstanding of the problem -- not that I do understand it, of course. However, the view from 20,000 feet looks something like:

- 50 years ago, say, there were about 1/2 as many people in the world.
- In the last 50 years, the amount of global wealth has grown a lot.
- In the rich parts of the world, the amount of wealth per person has grown and the growth of the population has stopped.
- In the poorer societies, the wealth of the society has grown, but the wealth per person has not. They have produced more people, not more wealth per person. [I claim that the wealth of the society must have grown, or these societies could not have increased their populations so dramatically.]

Hence I conclude that the problem is that there is something structurally wrong with poor societies that prevents them from bringing their people up from poverty.

In this light, it is actually worth asking why the richer societies have provided more wealth per person when the norm through history is to have large numbers of poor and a few rich people in most larger societies. It seems to me that a large part of the reason is possibly the migration of a reasonably technologically advanced society to a new continent. That by itself isn't enough to explain the difference though, since the US, for example, provides more for its people than Mexico.

Another idea is that of the labor movement, which forced the owners of the means of production to share the proceeds with their laborers.

In more recent history, much of the wealth in the rich societies has come about as a result of skilled labor. These skills tend to be rare, in that they can take years to develop and there tend to be relatively few people who develop any given set. As a result, the people who have the skills tend to be valuable to those that would employ them, resulting in high wages.

In other words, I suspect that a highly technological and specialized society will tend to produce wealth for a larger segment of the society due to the high value of the specialized skills needed to make it work and the high barrier to entry (the time required) to gain those skills.

Another guess

So here's another guess at a possible future ...

In the next two to four years, the world economy more or less claws its way back to not shrinking. The US grumbles, but the rest of the world has more trouble.

After a while (e.g. 2-5 years), either China or Pakistan goes unstable. There is widespread civil unrest in those countries. At some point, Pakistan and India go to war.

Then the middle east and north africa go unstable. This causes oil production, which was dropping already, to drop quite a lot.

That in turn, affects food production, which was barely keeping up with population growth, to drop. Asia and Africa see local fighting, of the Somali pirates and Darfur crisis variety in much larger amounts.

The lack of food and civil disturbance drives people into environments, like refugee camps, in which many people are crowded together with minimal sanitation and food. These spawn epidemic diseases, which spread beyond the camps to the cities.

Some people react by forming into militias to take over their neighbors resources. Existing infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, farms, oil wells) is destroyed. This reduces the effective carrying capacity of the affected regions.

World population drops, due to starvation and disease, mostly, with some warfare thrown in.

Another guess at the future

Here's a thought as it one way future events could play out:

• Obama & the Democrats win the 2008 election
• The US economy goes into recession starting in 2008
• The world goes into recession somewhat later in 2008
• Oil hovers for a while and then continues going up
• Political unrest continues, esp in Africa and the middle east
• The US and the world sink more deeply into the economic doldums
• The Republicans win in 2012
• Starting in 2012, within a year or two the dominos fall:
  




• The new president takes a hard line in the middle east and Pakistan, possibly invading Iran
  
• Pakistan falls into chaos
  
• Pakistan and India go to war
• Indonesia falls into chaos and civil war
• Saudi Arabia erupts into civil war
• Followed by the rest of the middle east
• Oil exports from the middle east fall to a small fraction of what they were
• China erupts into civil war
  

And then things get "interesting" ...

The South Beach Diet and insulin resistance

I'm reading the South Beach diet book and on page 41, met these sentences:

Once you've lasted through the 2 weeks of Phase 1 and rid yourself of your sugar addiction, you are ready to begin adding more carbohydrates to your diet. By this time, the insulin resistance syndrome has disappeared.

I find this comment quite remarkable for a number of reasons:

1. He is implictly claiming that people who are overweight/obsese have insulin resistance.
   
2. He is implictly claiming that insulin resistance is caused by eating carbs, which is not the orthodox idea.
   
3. It is not known if there is a cure at all (which is implied by disappeared)
   
4. It is not considered known (in standard medicine) that a low carb diet can lessen insulin resistance.
5. There is no reason that I know of to think that even if low carb does cure insulin resistance that it would happen if 2 weeks.

Type 2 diabetes is basically a very bad case of insulin resistance. The converse isn't necessarly true, that is having insulin resistance means a person is at risk for type 2 diabetes, but it may not have occured.

He doesn't (at least, so far as I've read) explain or justify this claim, so I don't know what causes him to make it. I'm willing to accept points 1 and 2 as working hypotheses (unproven, but plausible) .

Point 3, that there is a cure, is more interesting. Insulin resistance means that the body cells don't respond normally to insulin, requiring higher levels to use the glucose in the blood stream. Withoug eating carbs, there is no glucose needing to be managed, no need for insulin, no need for insulin receptors to act. Insulin resistance doesn't matter, because insulin isn't used. In that sense, a low carb diet sidesteps insulin resistance and makes it irrelevant. It isn't a cure, but it doesn't manage the condition.

However, what the body does when it isn't challenged by hits of glucose and how that affects insulin production and the cells response is pretty much unknown, at least from anything I've read. Perhaps it resets itself, this is possible. If it does, it is also unknown how long it takes, but I would be willing to bet it is longer than 2 weeks.

So in summary: These statements to me are a mix of the probable (but unproven) -- that overweight comes from faulty insulin activity, that insulin resistance comes from eating carbs, that low carb can manage insulin resistance, the questionable -- that one can return to eating (good) carbs with impunity after 2 weeks and the unbelievable -- that 2 weeks of low carb cures insulin resistance.

To give him credit, he does say at some point that if one starts eating carbs and no longer gains weight, the thing to do is to back off on the carbs.

Good news, bad news

I'm reading Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories with a great deal of fascination. Assuming (which I believe) that he is right, the good news is that it is possible -- for those who can afford it -- to lose their fat, or not gain it in the first place, and become much more healthy.

The bad news is that (unless there is some rabbit up a sleeve that I know nothing about), only a fraction, notably less than one (that is, less than 100%), of the worlds population can possibly use this solution. The rest are condemned to ill health and hidden malnutrition.

The very short summary is that carbohydrates (in particular refined carbohydrates) cause the fat cells to take the calories that are provided to the body and store them away as fat. This storage and/or the high insulin levels that are involved, cause heart disease, diabetes and possibly cancer and Alzheimer's also.

The way to not eat a diet high in carbs (and according to the low carb people, low is very low) is to eat a diet high in fat and protein. So far, so good -- but the way to eat a low carb diet is to eat meat -- lots of meat. If one eats mostly meat, supplemented with some eggs and aged cheese, one can eat very few carbs.

Of course, it takes a lot of grain to make meat. I read Diet for a Small Planet when I was in my 20s and for a number of years I was a vegetarian. However, she believed that as long as the diet provides enough protein, it is healthy. If anything, she probably believes that a low fat diet is more healthy than a high fat one and so being a vegetarian is more healthy than being a meat eater. It is surely counter-intuitive to think that a high fat diet will make a person thin, but such is the claim.

In the last several years, the world has grown less grain than it has eaten. If the best way to engender health in people is to feed the grain to animals and then eat the animals, the carrying capacity of the world (in terms of healthy people, not ones that are either starving outright, or starving at a cellular level) is even lower than the level we have now, not including the effects of environmental destruction. Thus, the bad news is that if he is right, then the resource crisis is much worse than I had imagined.

Prisoner's dilemma

A friend sent me a link to an article about peak oil, which said:

.. it is not hard to figure out what would happen when the government gets around to prioritizing uses.

Food production and distribution would come first, then public health (clean water, sewage, sanitation, medical services), then public safety including the armed forces, and finally some level of economic activity that uses petroleum products.

Suppose there are two countries (call them, say, China and Russia). One has lots of people, one has lots of oil resources. Suppose that if they pool their resources, only 20% of the people in both countries die, but if they fight then 25% of the people in both countries die. However, if they fight, let us say that one wins, the other loses and 10% of the people of the winning country die, with the rest in the losing country.

This is the Prisoner's dilemma at the country level -- they are both better off if they cooperate, but each better off if they defect first. The individuals in the country though, have a much better chance of surviving if their countries defect.

Of course, the political situation isn't that simple: if China were to attack Russia, Europe would perhaps get involved, for example. Also, the first targets would not be the industralized countries (which have armies with teeth), but the African ones that have oil, but not big armies. In any case, the US would get involved and sooner rather than later. The military needs oil to fight, so we would need to lock up a supply for ourselves early on or be rendered a toothless tiger (a motivation for invading Iraq that no one has suggested).

I suspect the order of priorities would (will?) be 1. military 2. food 3. vital services (e.g. water) and then everything else.